How Flock Safety Helped Locate 2 Kidnapped Minors

Our Take

Notice who's telling this story: Flock Safety, on Flock Safety's own channel, about Flock Safety's product. That's not journalism, it's a sales reel. When the company that profits from blanketing American roads with license plate readers also controls the only footage of its "wins," we're getting a marketing narrative, not an audit. A genuine recovery of two kidnapped teens is good news for those families — nobody disputes that. But one feel-good anecdote, produced and distributed by the vendor itself, tells us nothing about the millions of scans run on totally innocent people every single day, who never did anything wrong and never consented to being tracked.

This is the playbook: law enforcement tech companies lean hard on rare, dramatic cases — kidnappings, Amber Alerts, violent fugitives — to justify systems that function, in practice, as a permanent dragnet on ordinary drivers. Every trip to church, a protest, a doctor's appointment, or an ex's house gets logged into a database that can be queried, shared across state lines, and retained well beyond the window of any single investigation. The rare success story doesn't erase the routine, dayto-day surveillance of people who are not suspects in anything.

We're not saying these cameras never help find anyone. We're saying the public deserves numbers, audits, and independent oversight — not a glossy company video standing in for accountability. Check our camera map to see how much of this infrastructure has already gone up in your area, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your community.